Category Archives: mediafire

No, this isn’t the hardest thing in the world to find. But it is interesting, and I do reach for it from time to time as a good comp of mid-late 60s Stones stuff to put on that doesn’t feel played out. “Street Fighting Man” has different lyrics! -Ian!

This is the never-released album from 1971 (or was it 1972), which was pressed on a few acetates. Some acetates were sold, for a lot of money, a couple of years ago, and….surfaced on bootleg CD after a while. The songs are either completely different takes (like “Have You Seen Your Mother Baby”), or different mixes than the official versions (from Metamophosis) Pay Your Dues (the alternate version of Street Fighting Man) and the speeded-up Blue Turns To Gray are really fantastic, as Metomophosis, several of the songs features Jagger, Richards and studio musicians, and not the other Stones members.

The planned follow-up to Hot Rocks was to be titled Necrophilia, and was to have the tracks selected by the unpredictable Andrew Loog Oldham. A gatefold sleeve was designed by Fabio Nicoli using photography by the Stones’ official photographer from the sixties, Gered Mankowitz.

What you will hear here is a vinyl transfer to CD of the actual unreleased album. Alternate versions from 1964 to 1967.

Link Wray was one of rock & roll’s first bone fide guitar heroes, and his speaker-shredding buzzy chords were as distinctive a sound as anyone conjured up in rock’s early years. So Link’s old fans were thrown for a loop when, in 1971, the man made a comeback after several years along the margins with a self-titled album that set aside his big slabs of fretboard fuzz in favor of a loosely tight fusion of country, blues, and roughshod folk-rock. Recorded in a homemade three-track studio fashioned in an abandoned chicken coop on Wray’s Maryland farm, Link Wray lacks the muscle of the man’s legendary instrumental sides, with acoustic guitar, piano, and mandolin anchoring these sides as often as Link’s electric, and there’s a down-home mood here that lacks the switchblade intensity of Wray’s most famous music. But the rough passion of “Rumble” and “Rawhide” certainly carries through here, albeit in a different form; the plaintive howl of Wray’s vocals isn’t always pretty, but it certainly communicates (Wray lost a lung to TB in 1953), the best songs speak eloquently of the hard facts of Wray’s early life as a poor Shawnee child in the Deep South, and there’s a humble back-porch stomp in this music that’s heartfelt and immediate. (And Wray does serve up some primal hoodoo guitar on the closing cut, “Tail Dragger.”) Link Wray didn’t go over big with the man’s old fans and failed to win him many new ones, but it’s an honest and passionate piece of music that’s a fascinating detour from the music that has largely defined his career, and has aged better than the vast majority of the country-rock product of the early ’70s.

Largely recorded the same time as Link Wray’s self-titled 1971 comeback album, Beans and Fatback was more playful and harder-rocking set than the country- and blues-flavored album that announced Wray’s return to active duty. The loopy title cut started the album on a jew’s-harp-infused jug band note, and “I’m So Glad, I’m So Proud” was exactly the sort of showcase for Wray’s trademark rumbling guitar that the previous album lacked. Elsewhere, songs such as “Hobo Man” and “Georgia Pines” (the latter a rewrite of Leadbelly’s In the Pines”) followed the roots-oriented pattern of Link Wray, but with a stronger backbone and a lot more wallop; if both albums sound like they came from a studio housed in a chicken shack on a rundown Maryland farm, Beans and Fatback seems to have been born during a Saturday night rave-up, and goes a lot father toward fusing the rowdy howl of Wray’s early instrumental hits with the back-to-the-land flavor of his more personal 1971 set. If Beans and Fatback suffers in comparison to Link Wray, it’s in the lack of the deeper and more emotionally resonant undercurrents that carried the 1971 album; as good as these songs are, they don’t have the same impact as, say, “Fire and Brimstone” or “Take Me Home Jesus.” But as a pure listening experience, Beans and Fatback is plenty satisfying, and offers more rock & roll bang for the buck than Wray’s other work from this period. Virgin’s original LP release of Beans and Fatback also included a free piece of dried fatback as a “bonus” — yummy!

Might seem strange to drop this in the middle of this ’60s psych frenzy, but this is probably my favorite Cure album, it has a consistent dreariness that just suits a damp, cold Sunday like this.

Anyway, this is a rip I made of my vinyl, which is an Elektra first pressing from 1980. I dunno if it’s rare or anything, I’ve had it since like 1997. Anyway, don’t bother with the 2005 remaster of this album, they accidentally destroyed the master in a washing machine during the 80s (really), and they actually used a vinyl as the source for the remaster! So, here’s an original vinyl rip. I don’t have fancy audiophile equipment I just recorded it at 24/96 and dithered it down. It sounds pretty good to me.

“Ignored upon its release in 1974 and celebrated upon its reissue in 2001, Shuggie Otis’ fourth and last album Inspiration Information exists out of time — a record that was of its time, but didn’t belong of it; a record that was idiosyncratic but not necessarily visionary. It was psychedelic soul that was released far too late to be part of any zeitgeist and it was buried at the time.

Yet no matter what Luaka Bop’s grand poobah David Byrne claims on the sticker — he says Shuggie’s “trippy R&B jams are equal to Marvin’s and Curtis’, but somehow more contemporary sounding…closer to D’Angelo meets DJ Shadow” — this isn’t revolutionary. It can occasionally sound modern, such as on the rolling head trip “XL-30,” but only because it’s the kind of groove Shadow would sample and build on; the slow, liquid instrumental head trips sound the same way. Perhaps that’s why it can seem more contemporary — contemporary ears are more attuned to these relaxed, warmly trippy soundscapes.

Otis crafted all of this essentially alone, playing each instrument himself, and it’s quite clearly a reflection of his inner psyche, and no matter how much it floats and skates upon its own sound, it’s a welcoming, inviting sound. But, no matter how much the partisans claim — and their effusive praise is plastered all over the liner notes, with Sean O’Hagan claiming that it shocks you out of a rut, Stereolab’s Tim Gane says it is “almost like a new style of music that could’ve developed but never did” — this isn’t revolutionary, even if it’s delightfully idiosyncratic. So, don’t fall for the hyperbole.

This isn’t an album that knocks your head off — it’s subtle, intricate music that’s equal parts head music and elegant funk, a record that slowly works its way under your skin. Part of the reason it sounds so intriguing in 2001 is that there just aren’t that many musicians that doggedly pursue their individual vision while retaining a sense of focus. But it isn’t a record without precedent, nor is it startling. It’s a record for people that have heard a lot of music, maybe too much, and are looking for a new musical romance.”